Posted by pseudolus 9/13/2025
I remember that feeling of being blown away at talking (typing) with people across the world without any limitations!
But for me this was in the late 80s and earliest 90s on the Internet. When all communication was standards-based, fully interoperable and completely free.
What we call today "social media" is just the proprietarization, for profit, of what existed before in a much more open fashion.
Today’s social media heavily focus on the individual, not the group, which is ironic. It’s a lot of people clamoring for attention while also consuming only through the algorithm (aka the echo feedback).
The old social media was more like going out. Instantly you feel that not everything is about you. But you still have familiar place you can hangout and useful place when you need something.
When I see the term social media, I associate it with one way relationships. It is about connecting businesses to customers, not the other way around. It is about connecting self-promoters (for the lack of a better term) to an audience, not the other way around. As you said: the focus is on the individual, may that be a person or a business.
Perhaps we should be making an effort to distinguish between the two environments, to avoid associating connecting businesses and self-promoters to customers with connecting people to each other.
It should all be called social marketing, not social media, as it really just a thin veneer over the Google and Meta ad monopolies.
Your attention was once in other places and it moved onto the Internet. The ad monopolists figured out a way to turn the Internet into a marketing platform, by purchasing their competitors and then gradually changing the features their services offered. They then converted you from a human being into a unit of advertising inventory. Doctorow's reverse centaur aptly describes the phenomenon; the simian body is slaved to the ad machine brain and now follows its command through the magic of cheap psychological tricks.
A pet peeve of mine is when businesses reject the marketing channel they own (their websites) to adopt platforms like X or Instagram. Use them, yes, but do publish on your own site (and adopt RSS along the way).
Another way to look at it is that depending upon social media for anything beyond promotion leaves you at the whim of those companies. Facebook only let's viewers see a limited slice of information unless they log in. Places that used Twitter as a newsfeed ended up showing chaotic junk when Twitter became X, unless the user was logged in. I was doing a web search yesterday that turned up a lot of Yelp results. I didn't realize that Yelp was still a thing. Judging from the content, it probably isn't. The list goes on. As a potential customer, it leaves me with a very dim view of the companies that rely upon social media instead of supplementing their presence with social media.
Another instance of that is when your account at these proprietary companies simply disappears for no reason. It is far too risky to depend on them.
A long-time friend, for example, has a decades old business which had a 15+ year presence on facebook. A few weeks ago the account just silently disappeared. Obviously any response from facebook is impossible to obtain.
Luckily they also have their own website with all the content.
>> [Social media] is about connecting businesses to customers, not the other way around
Originally there were no business accounts, ads, or news feeds on Facebook, for example.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35877603 :
> for the record, e.g. Facebook did originally require a .edu email address at an approving institution
What were the other pivots from that original - textual personal profile and you can only write on other peoples' walls - product to profitability?
I agree entirely with this. I think that it's helpful to remember that "social media" arose to differentiate itself from "traditional media", the social piece is a descriptor not a function. Traditional media has been one-way, and the goal of corporations has been to make social media largely one-way as well but to make it feel like it's not. Social media exists mostly to serve influencers, brands, and celebrities and all of us are eyeballs to monetize.
It tells you exactly what it does in a way that "social media" obscures. Nothing drives engagement like a Gossip Engine!
One: algorithmic feeds (etc) are engineered to addict you
Two: virality stats (views and likes) allow senders to hone message effectiveness based on structure (funny GIF, misspelling, "this you", etc), completely separate from content (white supremacy, authoritarian communism, etc)
This is why Reddit is maybe barely social media, and HN, other forums, IRC, etc, aren't.
Biggest difference for me betweeen HN/reddit and the forums of yore is how the ranking/sorting is done. On HN/reddit, "most popular" opinion or "best sounding" post usually "wins" and gets most discussed, as it's at the top of the page.
Meanwhile, forums doesn't re-order things like that (didn't used to at least), you made a post and it ended up after the message posted before you, and before messages posted after. Everyone's view and message was equal, so pile-ons or hive-mind "this is the right way of thinking" seemed less common.
In certain unmoderated Usenet forums, and later web forums (e.g. Slashdot), there were often huge chunks of threads you'd have to scroll past and read between to find nuggets of value. Points systems emerged to separate the wheat from the chaff, and in many ways ushered an improved reading/discussion experience.
> In certain unmoderated Usenet forums, and later web forums (e.g. Slashdot), there were often huge chunks of threads you'd have to scroll past and read between to find nuggets of value. Points systems emerged to separate the wheat from the chaff, and in many ways ushered an improved reading/discussion experience.
The following was built and deployed in Taiwan and proved to be very capable at sidestepping policy gridlock.
I've often wondered if some of the concepts that power it could be applied to help facilitate more generalized discussion and debate (which could also optionally tie into instances of the original political purpose it was built for).
https://github.com/pluralitybook
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/17/audrey...
A forum ultimately ends up a group of more or less known individuals with a focus.
Reddit and HN don't have that feel, chatrooms and such as Discord usually do, unless they get huge and overwhelm Dunbar's number.
The friend feeds like Facebook's are less anonymous, but they do not form topical discussions nor feel like hangouts with the person.
I believe that what has changed is less about technology or even money, but about people. In your time frame, everyone on the Internet was an academic techie. You could bump into a random person on IRC and have something to talk about.
You can connect with vastly more people today, but they are less likely to be of interest to you. You're spoiled for choice: there are now a trillion chat rooms instead of a thousand. It's harder to find your people.
Yes, fortunately. Email should always be used, at least as an available option, because it is the only truly open way to communicate electronically.
Recently I bought something and had some hiccups getting it to work and found that the vendor only provides support in one single place: discord. A proprietary platform I can't get access to.
> Even Usenet still exists. There may be more people on it now than there were in the 80s, just because it was so tiny then.
I still read usenet most days ;-)
But no, it is very small compared to the good times. It would take me hours to read through my list of newsgroups in 1990, now at most 10 minutes.
The reason I believe things are different is that the Internet was tech people. People more likely to be logical and rational. Once "regular" people came on they brought their stupidity with them.
Accounts like "Endwokeness" would have never worked in the old internet era. First of all, low effort political opening post with one sentence and a link would simply be removed. Secondly, people will make fun of him. Doesn't he have job? Why he is so obsessed with gays and trans people? Stuff like that will haunt him forever.
Each started thread also needed a "basis for discussion" to remain open, and necrobumping was encouraged. The forum still has decade old threads actively being discussed in.
AFAIK, it's still the largest forum in the Nordics, although the moderation team (and voluntary) seem to unfortunately be shrinking rather than increasing, and the forum isn't without its controversies.
Until this century, people lived in a social world constrained by geography: your family, neighbors, and friends were the people physically present around you, an accident of geography rather than one of interest. The people around you might well not have shared many of your ideas, and that friction kept you in check just as you inhibited them to some extent. Nobody you knew went out in public dressed like a dog or advocated for the disenfranchisement of people who eat peanut butter because you and his other friends would intervene, telling him that those are crazy views.
Now, with the internet, your crazy friend can shun your inhibiting company, lock himself away in his house, and spend all his time on fora and discord and corners of social media where people share his views. His like-minded friends tell him that dressing as a dog is fulfilling his Dog-given identity, and that the peanut-butter eaters are committing genocide against his own like-minded people. Without the inhibition of friends drawn from the accident of geography, the man who surrounds himself with virtual e-friends in a social media echo chamber thinks that the crazy ideas he hears online are normal.
Maybe the inhibition we get from socializing with people who don't share our interests, that friction of dealing with people in real life, keeps us from sliding into mental illnesses and political extremism that spring up when we get nothing but validation from people who share our interests.
At the same time people are more mobile than ever because of technological, opportunity and work reasons as well. So, there is a lack of real grounding. Why bother being friends with your neighbors or local people when you can just travel for not very long and visit people you prefer?
It leads to tensions because people live close together but have a very different way of life and sometimes radically different values, even in close quater communities. They end up hating each other secretly because without communication you cannot even begin to empathise.
The social media groups reflect that; they are an echo chamber to cry about people and behaviors you don't like and reinforce your own opinions, behaviors and their superior validity.
There is also the part where large government of the providence state are to be blamed for favoring rampant individualism. Instead of having to deal with friends and family you deal with soulless corporation and obtuse bureaucracy to get your needs met.
When 50 years ago you could drop by to see your doctor, now you call a number, a robot answers and gives you an appointment in one month. It's not just social media that is to blame it's just technology in general that has allowed and basically created a massive bureaucracy for everything, pretending to focus on making things efficient when it basically only consumes value and is just a means of control/surveillance.
We launched with a focus on photo and media sharing to try to compete with Facebook, which was just pokes at the time. It was growing too fast though — it was too popular. And in any case, we probably had misconceptions about a bunch of things.
We had this whole social blogging and communication system — it was really very cool in concept. But we had too much of a “if you build it, they will come” marketing plan.
We gave up after a year and a half. We ended up selling a version of it to Teach for America.
I’d consider it a failure — we gave up. I rather wish we’d have tried to raise money, though.. I can’t believe we got as far as we did — different times
This environment to me felt like a slow agonizing mental deathdeath, every day. I wasn't particularly hated by my environment, I wasn't bullied, but watching it drained every will to keep going out of my soul.
The internet was a real blessing. Not to meet likeminded people, but to find something, anything more than this bullshit. And how wonderfully weird things were, it was the peak of myspace and ICQ. I met one of my best friends online in a totally niché musician board about music composition and have been in nearly daily contact with him before I met him for the first time after 4 years. To this day, nearly 20 years later we are still in regular contact and listen to each others music.
The internet was a place for people like me, weirdos who felt they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. These were what felt like the dominant forces in the Internet.
Nowadays the very people I tried to get away from as a teenager are the dominant forces. The ones that constantly voiced the same shitty jokes about people who are different, only now they additionally complain that they aren't allowed to say that (while saying that). The ones that are so afraid of not being a "real" man/woman, that they lash out at everybody who lives in a way that questions their ideals. The bullies who thrive at punching down, because they think it propels them up somehow. The mean spirited idiots, who want you to stay dumb too so they look smarter. The whole depressing team.
Add a metric ton of corporate enshittification, professionalization of commentators and other actors on the net and you have it. The reason why the internet sucks more than it once did.
I wish more people started to embrace and publish the weird small things again, while ignoring that fake solipsist social media world of isolation.
Don't know what the solution is but I also miss the weird small stuff, especially discussions that felt like they were between two people wanting to talk with each other, not discussions between people who are trying to convince each other or others.
Sometimes I wake up and think the only reasonable solution is to try to start up a web forum myself, employ the moderation strategies I used to see working for those types of discussions and give it a shot to bring it back. Luckily, HN is probably the most similar place on the web today, but it's just one place, with its well-known drawbacks that comes with the focus/theme it has.
Places like forums are great, but I don't even think it is strictly necessary need to make one (unless there is a niché that you care for which hasn't been covered). Maybe it is already enough to pick one that exists and to actively participate in it. I remember reading threads where I went like: "Man, these people are really, really into that topic, this is great!"
Reminds me of the succinctly-demonstrated problem of: https://webcomicname.com/post/185588404109
When you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
Traditional forums still exist.
There are corners of the Internet where people meet on smaller forums to talk about subjects of mutual interest, and those remain functional and interesting, sometimes even polite.
Sure there are communal pathologies here, like excessive hair splitting (guilty), but on balance we’ve got a good thing going here. If this seems no different from the big commercial platforms to you, I frankly don’t know what to say, to me the difference is plain to see.
Agreed. HN isn't 100/0 signal/noise or even 100/0 politeness/rudeness, but I get the feeling most people discuss things with a relatively open mind here, and it's not uncommon for people to either be corrected by others and accepting it, or correcting themselves if they've found something out after submitting their comment. Just seeing that happening makes me hopeful overall.
It's a huge contrast from basically any mainstream social media, where the only time you'd see something like that is when you're talking with literal friends.
That's is due to active moderation, but it's orthogonal to being in a bubble. There are also some very similarly moderated, polite communities on other platforms, even Facebook, but they're still bubbles. People on HN are already self-selecting to an extent, and if you stray to far from the core audience, you'll be downvoted to dead.
That's how the forum is designed to work, but it is definitionally a bubble.
> If this seems no different from the big commercial platforms to you, I frankly don’t know what to say, to me the difference is plain to see.
It is no different to the other well-moderated communities on the other commercial platforms. The only difference is that you like this bubble more than the others.
Just, FTR, there's always been the problem of how much moderation is required to keep the discourse (in a group) flowing without being so restrictive as to only be about the moderators.
See IRC, which (IMO) can be over-moderated, channel ops used to be very much about themselves, vs Usenet, which had no moderation at all (and was "destroyed" by google groups making access trivial for troublemakers), through to current things like Reddit which have some moderators.
It's (IMO) exactly like governance IRL - some countries overdo it, and some underdo it.
Social platforms built on voting, like HN, will almost always drift into bubbles of like-minded posts and comments. The only variation is in which views get upranked.
That isn’t necessarily bad. YC clearly prefers HN to filter for a certain entrepreneurial mindset. Bubbles can serve a purpose, but it’s worth recognising that this is a manipulated environment - in many ways hollow - and not a reflection of the broader world.
Yeah, I've been sadly thinking about similar things. Something like a web-forum where it costs $1 to signup, and your account gets active after a day. Would serve as an automatic "You're 18" since regulations around that seems to be creeping up, and would hopefully lower the amount of abuse as people have to spend actual money to get an account.
It just sucks because there are plenty of sub-18 year old folks who are amazing and more grown up than people above 18, not everyone who has access to making internet payments and also not everyone has the means to even spend $1 on something non-essential.
Not sure if there is anything in-between "completely open and abuse-friendly" and "closed castle for section of the world population" that reduces the abuse but allow most humans on the planet.
You don’t need to be 18 to have a bank account, even in the UK (which just introduced age verification laws).
https://www.hsbc.co.uk/current-accounts/products/children/
https://www.barclays.co.uk/current-accounts/childrens-bank-a...
And there are banks and fintech companies which give you pre-paid cards which function as credit cards for online payments. You top them up whenever you want and that’s your spending limit. Parents can just hand those to kids for day-to-day operations.
In short, being able to pay 1$ online is not sufficient age verification.
> It just sucks
I agree. One mitigation around that could be the gifting of accounts. People lurk in more than one forum, so if you meet someone which seems to have their head in place and would be interested to join, you gift them the membership. Keep the association between accounts in a database for, say, one year to see how it goes. If someone repeatedly gifts accounts to people who end up being spammers, you revoke their gifting privileges.
Yeah, I had one of those myself when I was under 18 too, I think it was called Maestro or something similar. However, it didn't work like a normal credit card (which I think only 18+ can have), platforms were clearly able to reject it, as most things I wanted to buy online didn't work at the time with it (this was early 2000s though), only with my mom's debit card.
Probably the same is true for those cards you linked, they're special "youth" cards that platforms could in theory block? Then requiring credit card "donation" of $N would still basically act as a age verification. I think debit cards might in general be available to people under 18, so filtering to only allow credit cards sounds like a start at least.
Newgrounds literally employed the same strategy for automatically validating a bunch of users, from https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1548205:
> 2. If your account ever bought Supporter status with a credit card and we can confirm that with the payment processor, we will assume you are over 18 because you need to be 18 in the UK to have a credit card.
Basically, filter by the card type, assume credit = 18+, any other might be under 18.
> One mitigation around that could be the gifting of accounts
Yeah, referrals ala Lobste.rs. I feel like they get lots of stuff right, from transparent moderation to trying to keep it small but high-quality. The judge is still out on if they got it right or not :)
Nope, there’s nothing “youth” about them, they’re more like safety features. The cards I’m talking about act as real credit cards. Plus, I forgot to mention but there are also services (even provided by the banking networks in the countries themselves) which allow you to connect an account (or deposit some money in) and get temporary credit card numbers for online payments. I’ve used them and know multiple people (also adults) who still do.
> Basically, filter by the card type, assume credit = 18+, any other might be under 18.
My point is that maybe that’s enough in the UK (is it?) but you probably wouldn’t be able to rely on it for every jurisdiction.
To be clear, I like your idea in general and would not want to discourage you from it—quite the contrary—I’m just alerting to the fact it might need further though so you don’t end up sinking time on something which wouldn’t work.
> Yeah, referrals ala Lobste.rs.
I wasn’t aware that’s how they worked. I’ll have a read. For anyone else curious:
And no worries, nothing discouraging, discussing the idea with others no matter their reaction tends to do the opposite for me, so thanks again for taking the time :)
When you have people with power over someone else, power to ban, power to economically injure, you end up, almost without fail, with sycophantic groupings.
People only praise those with the power, and anyone foolish enough to disagree, no matter how accurate, are punished.
That is, there's not actually anything new in that political discourse (literally, it was all libertarians, gun lovers and free speechers threatening/bullying anyone that disagreed with them then, like it is now)
There were even "wars" - the Meow Wars were long dead history when I were a Usenetter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meow_Wars
I have often wondered why such a thing hasn't arisen again, on things like twitter.
We still have "flame wars" I think, they're just less intelligent, is more about spamming than insulting, and is often called "brigading" instead, basically one community trying to "overrun" another community one way or another.
Yeah, I think that you're right - Reddit is often referred to as being the Usenet of today, which is where I see the term brigading coming up the most.
https://everything2.com/title/antiorp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netochka_Nezvanova_(author)
EDIT: clarity
It's when they become bigger that the crappy echo chamber begins.
OTOH I have seen examples where messages were supressed. A FB acquaintance was sued under the DMCA for posting data that has since legally been deemed public domain. I suggested setting up in the Netherlands where DMCA is not recognised, via Messenger. Meeting this person in person sometime later, it turned out this message was never delivered. They'd thought I was working for the company that sued them.
Nothing is ever pushed on me by the platform, so the whole experience doesn't become combative. That does mean though that each user has to do some work finding others they like, and that can take some time. But that also weeds out those that just want to be spoonfed content, which is a plus.
The last three years on there have been some of the most wholesome social media interactions I have had in the last 25 years.
In the discourse about social media, the term "algorithm" is exclusively used to refer to purposefully-maligned algorithms engineered to addict and abuse people. Nothing about any of the Fediverse services is designed this way because they're not chasing money or engagement, they're made to help people converse in a human way.
So it's literally just "bad algorithms" (the ones other platforms make) and "good algorithms" (the good algorithms good platforms make, like us). Which is kind of literally how it is, there are good ones and bad ones, except both of these kinds of platforms employ "bad" engagement driving discovery algorithms, so it's really just 'us vs them'. The trending and news algorithms are literally just driving engagement and discovery, and top hashtags feed is proudly clamoring how much engagement there is. Doesn't seem like they're not "chasing" it.
I think this is the part of Mastodon's code that calculates the Trending page: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/tree/main/app/models/tr...
These sorts of algorithms tend to promote posts or people that have recently been popular for the purpose of being useful to folk. On the likes of tiktok, facebook and twitter they are the culmination of very large sums of money and an ocean of professional psychological collaborators with the aim to purposefully harm and addict people, e.g. to manipulate public opinion and democracy, incite the suicide of transgender people and the perpetration of genocide. For money. I find it difficult to believe that you're arguing, in good faith, that the two types of "algorithm" have much in common.
I am not sure how it is "evil" showing recently-popular posts on a social media server's home page to logged-out people, and how that's pushing anything. It's not an agenda, it's not a series of posts that are picked because they are likely to addict and enrage people. I do suspect that there's some ragebait that shows up, because some people are still having to unlearn the indoctrination they're suffering from.
It's not "evil" to be showing an algo feed per se. But mastodon and a bunch of other platforms refer to algo feeds as "bad/evil" or something of the sort, market themselves as not having them, and yet thoroughly employ multiple algo feeds. Is that not just hypocritical? It looks glaringly dishonest. They could at least have some integrity to say "we don't like the yucky algorithms, but here we only have good™ algorithms", when that's literally what it is.
But I feel like it misses the point. What about a service where you can design and use your own "algorithms", and it's built into the platform?
Such a platform would have thousands of algorithms, but none of them designed for chasing money or engagement, just different preferences. But Mastodon could still claim "We don't use The Algorithm and is therefore better than other places" while a platform with custom user-owned algorithms could get the best of both worlds.
A very quick peruse of the Mastodon issue tracker came up with information about this on the ActivityPub level (albeit in an old toot): https://mastodon.social/@reiver/113668493283013849 and someone kindly rounded up similar feature requests here: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/33098#issuecomme...
I like the idea of it not being related to a platform or implementer, but baked into the spec ala a feature of ActivityPub.
I feel like the wording needs a bit of rewording/rework. I agree chronological order facilitates better discussions, but just saying that "Mastodon lacks algorithms" doesn't really help people understand things better.
1. No algorithm beyond most-recent-first
2. Stick to a maximum of ~250 following
3. Pay for the service instead of ad-supported
I can easily do all of those on Mastodon.
What grinds my gear after this attack is that majority of mastodon clients doesn't offer a simple way to block instance that would limit unwanted posts. Some even don't have that feature at all.
The point where social media failed was when the government agreed, at the behest of the companies, that platforms aren't liable for what is published there. So it has allowed a flood of inflammatory accusations that make it hard to find the individual responsible, where it would be easier to just take the platform to court like you would a paper, or a TV channel.
And some.
We've known that humans prefer to hear about trouble, strife, and tension for a very long time - that's why the evening news was always a downer, and newspapers before that.
Now it's just a platform for content mills. Producer to consumer.
Social media was peer to peer and it's dead.
At first I was not sure if the article really means exhaustion of the user, but then it says things like
"people scroll not because they enjoy it, but because they don’t know how to stop".
Sure, social media is a big waste of time, like gambling is a waste of money and drugs are a waste of health (and money), but do any of these feel "exhausting" to to user?
"Regret" comes to mind, maybe "shame". I think if platforms were exhausting to a significant number of people they were not that successful.
Of course what you’re reading is other neurotic folks sharing their anxieties. And algorithmic feed gives you their content. So it becomes self-reinforcing.
It makes it overall sound like the author's metric of liveliness is the same if disguised metric of being big, which ultimately drove the other huge players to the state they're talking about.
I used to consume a lot of Tumblr content 10+ years ago, and back then it seemed a wonderful platform (pseudonymity, lack of censorship, little or no ads) but I haven't seen anything from it in a while, which makes me think it may be less popular and so less viable.
I would be happy if there's still a small bu thriving community over there, and I wish they'd gone ahead with activitypub support.
I think it's less obvious when looking at Twitter, Facebook, HN or similar, where things are kind of sneakily re-ranked depending on "the algorithm", but when you look at reddit this effect is really visible and obvious. Doesn't matter how true/false something is, it sounds true or is easy to agree with it, so up to the top it goes.
Segregation applied to public spaces should indeed be banned, when these platforms become so huge, they become a defacto public square that you can hardly avoid effectively without missing a good share of the conversations that need to happen in public for a healthy flow of information, so I would not see an issue with law makers to regulate this... obviously as long as it's applied fairly.
The issue is that currently even platforms that are getting regulate, for even more concerning aspect (national security, undue foreign influence on fair elections) like Tiktok seem to be exempt of the law itself and the US Congress seem unable to get the laws they voted in a bipartisan manner enforced... the only reason I see is that a certain tangerine tinted individual sees it as a tool to control the American discourse in his favor, and thus refuses to enforce the law. So these concerns about healthy public spaces are taking the backseat for now.
IMHO it would be awesome to have again sane, SOCIAL-media. Probably with the correct regulation it could be done… And the current SM platforms could use the regulation as well (force viewing only what one follows, make it transparent like other media - i.e. if someone has more than 10k "followers" it's just a media so put same requirements: full ID disclosure and having to respond to the takedowns immediatelly…)
Feels a lot like what going all-in on social media does to your social life. Interacting with real people is rewarding and can boost your energy. Social media is exhausting and drains your energy so you don't feel like talking to real people.
Not for everybody. Me and a work friend are considered "highly energetic" by our colleagues when we are at the office in person, to the point that people and things soon find themselves in orbit around us. But the truth is that when we come home, we both feel drained and exhausted for the next day or two. For me, it's as if my entire mind and soul got washed and diluted by those interactions.
I'm not saying it's all bad, in the same way that running a marathon is probably not all bad. But "boost your energy" wouldn't be a term I would ever use for it.